Acid Armor - Smeargle
by E.I.G
Summary: Smeargle quite enjoys his friends on the Acid Armor rescue team, and the uses he's found for the move that gives them their name.


Acid Armor - Smeargle

A soft scritching filled the clearing from his claw against the canvas. Or rather from the solid part of Smeargle's claw, the tip was currently made of the blob of paint he was using to trace the lines out on the material.  
He preferred this unorthodox use of Acid Armor over just using his tail for rough sketching as it left thinner lines. The move had proved very helpful since he learned it from Vaporeon, and discovered that for him the defense increasing move manifested by converting his canine frame into living paint.

"Hey, Smeargle, how's it going?" the water type asked from the edge of the open area in the local forest.

"Fine, I'm just trying to capture the forest. Not many pokemon out though," he answered while finishing a bit of the treeline on the sketch.

"Looks like you're a bit melted there, how do you keep yourself so solid while doing that?" she asked jumping next to him, a small splash of water flowing out where she landed.

Smeargle chuckled as he turned to look at his watery friend. "My hard part is melting in the first place. My body is used to having some paint inside of it, not being made out of paint."

Machop's fist hit Smeargle hard sending him flying.  
For a moment after he hit the wall he wasn't sure what happened. Then he realized that he had experienced something that happened to Vaporeon all the time, he had splattered against the hard surface. Smeargle quickly began pulling the three or four main blobs of paint that made up his body back together while trying to think of how he had liquefied without deliberately using Acid Armor.

Opening, or maybe it was better to say forming, his eyes revealed a cluster of very worried pokemon. Machop looked distraught and was cradling his fist like he thought his attack had killed. There was a splat of Smeargle's poison-green paint on the limb, revealing that the dog-pokemon's body had liquefied before he even hit the wall.  
Vaporeon and Muk looked broken, though his friends seemed to have noticed that he was getting back together. Behind those three was a small crowd that seemed to only be held off by the poison-type's stench.

Getting together after being spatted seemed easier than it usually was when he was under the effect of the melting move. He quickly reformed his body, although he was still exhausted from the fight. A quick look at himself and the training field showed that his color was at least mostly normal, and that there was a massive splash of his paint across the stone wall he had hit.

"I think I'm done for the day," Smeargle said as best he could and started on his way to the base he shared with the two other Acid Armor users.

They lived in a small mostly collapsed building. They had light and various other small things that they did not need to remove in the private area where they slept. Which was a good thing as getting anything significant past the debris was difficult and time consuming. To get into the small chamber they all melted down and used one of the two pipes that led into the old washroom. One of these was clean and clear if a bit rusty, but the other was dirty and covered in a layer of paint. Vaporeon refused to flow along the same line that was travelled by a mass of poison waste or glob of somewhat toxic paint.

In one corner was the broken sink in a small trench etched by Muk's body as the large blob slept. The other side had a large tub with a permanently sealed drain used as a bed by Vaporeon at night. Smeargle barely pulled himself together as he exited the dirty pipe and made his way to the last portion of the room, where his old paint cans and small waterproof rolls of material surrounded a short mat.

The cans held a variety of colors that he used with the rolls to do small test sketches before working on them later with higher quality materials on the surface. Muk had a number of toxic liquids to help clean the rolls when they became too filled, and sometimes Vaporeon brought down new ones through her clean route.

Feeling like he was about to fall out of his own skin Smeargle looked between the mat he usually slept on and the near empty can he put excess amounts of his own naturally made paint into, and proceeded to the latter thinking that feeling like an idiot would be better than risking being absorbed by the mat if he could not stay solid. Both his roommates had indicated that they would naturally stop themselves from such a fate once when he had wondered about the idea of his bed being a risk to them aloud. He wasn't really thinking straight about anything at the moment, in fact he was currently flowing down into the paint can almost entirely out of control. By the time he had settled into the container it was almost full and the dog turned art supply was fast asleep.

Waking up as the contents of a paint can was a novel experience. Knowing exactly what Vaporeon meant by keeping himself together was not quite as new, when he had used the move that usually caused this change multiple times in a row it also resulted in holding onto a stable form being difficult. The difference today was that in the past Smeargle had returned to being solid whenever he got so tired that he fell asleep.

He knew what the issue was, in fact it was something of a family problem. A smeargle that used a Sketched move too much and too creatively could actually really learn it, and that could change them. His mother knew Water Gun so well that she could do anything from a thin trickle of fresh water to what almost looked like a Hydro Pump, but she also took more damage from Electric moves and had a thinner, runny paint. His father's knowledge of Flamethrower resulted in a weakness to his mother's water and a paint so flammable that he had been mistaken for a charmander at times.  
And now it seemed that Smeargle himself knew Acid Armor to the point that he was paint, although his paint had possessed its poisonous edge as long as he could remember.

Looking around showed that both of his friends were again looking at him with worried expressions, this time from their respective places in the home. The paint-dog quickly said that he was fine and made his way through the pipe to the surface, into another portion of the building.

He made his way to a room where they kept an intact mirror to inspect his form for any changes. A first look made it seem like the problem was internal, he was still a tan and brown dog with a tail splashed with his green paint. Looking closely at his face he moved to see the details of his eyes, from a distance they did not seem any different but looking up close the band of color on them that had always matched his paint now appeared to have been the result of spreading some onto a glass sphere instead of a color inside glass.

Opening his mouth immediately changed any notion that the differences in his shape were nearly nonexistent. The inside was entirely colored like his toxic green paint, and his surprise made the inside melt a bit so that it looked like just a opening full of the thick liquid. He forced it solid again and inspected the structures more carefully. They all looked to be the same shape, but the solid color made it appear to be a mass of his own paint.

Closing his mouth he moved to the most important part of a smeargle's body, his tail-brush. Moving it into his view it looked right for all of a heartbeat before he realized that the tip was not covered in green paint but with fur of his color. Slightly panicked he tried to expel a bit of paint to the tip, but instead of some paint oozing onto the hairs this resulted in the fur at the tip melting down into a glob the shape of a brush. In fact it extended to the entire brushlike nub, mixing his normal color and the tan of his fur for a moment before it was converted to just the green shade.

-

"Are you really ok?" Vaporeon asked the dog pokemon as he stared at his tail. She wasn't, they had let the strange copy-pokemon stay with them mostly because he had been fun to be around and didn't mind a Muk. Got along with the sludge beast very well actually, apparently all smeargle drank paint. The tan painter actually had lunch with Vaporeon's toxic friend. She didn't like the thought that their interaction had caused him to be hurt so badly he had whatever that was happen the previous day.

"Well, no not really," Smeargle answered, "but my family usually winds up unusual. Dad is usually on fire and mom puts him out." The statement was accompanied by a laugh, "Not really though, Dad's paint is an oil so water just makes the fire spread."

"Okay," she had little idea what he meant, but his voice was distracted so she figured he wasn't really talking to her. The previous day gave an excellent excuse for him to be distracted. Vaporeon could still see the tan dog hit the wall and explode into massive pools of paint. Machop had to be carried home by one of his older brothers after seeing what had happened, and she wasn't sure the fighting type had gotten the paint off of his fist.

Her sense of smell was the first thing to let her know her other friend had arrived. "You still smell the same," the blob commented, "like the paint Mr. Delibird doesn't sell to anyone who isn't a poison type." Vaporeon paused at the realization that Muk was right about the tint to the canine's smell. Having her odours friend she made her had work hard to keep her ability to identify smells, but for the people they rescued it was worth it.

Smeargle looked back at them in response finally appearing to be in the present, "Well, yeah. That's always been a problem for me, my own paint has a bit of lead and other things so we couldn't really sell any back home."

"Back home where your dad is on fire, was he a fire type?" she asked trying to learn what his earlier comment meant. She hoped that an explanation would help with whatever had happened.

"Do you know the phrase 'if you keep making that face it will stick that way'?" Smeargle asked.

"Kinda, I was really young when I found the water stone," Vaporeon admitted, her family had been upset about having a young pokemon that could only be stopped by sealed containers.

"I don't really have a face," Muk said briefly creating a second opening to their 'mouth' as a demonstration.

"Well, anyway. Our Sketch moves can be like that," he responded and started to explain his family's oddities.


End file.
